Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Body Art - Shock - Cultural and Celebrity Worship

I'd like to reflect and expand on Piero Manzoni's 1961
piecein which he canned 91 cans of feces. A label on each
identified the contents as "Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net
freshly preserved and 'made in Italy'. He said "If collectors want
something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own
shit, that is really his." Manzoni's actions were "affirmation of the
body itself as a valid art material" (Thames & Hudson, pg. 147) It's
not known how many cans were sold but his decision to value his excrement on a
par with the price of gold made clear reference to the tradition of the artist
as alchemist already forged by Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein among others. As
the artist and critic Jon Thompson has written:

Manzoni's critical and metaphorical reification of the
artist's body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an
understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist's body
as a consumable object. The artist's shit, dried naturally and canned 'with no
added preservatives', was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied
nature of artistic labor: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material,
and its violent expulsion as commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as
part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging,
marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum.

Artist's Shit was made at a time when
Manzoni was producing a variety of works involving the fetishization and
commodification of his own body substances. These included marking eggs with
his thumbprints before eating them, and selling balloons filled with his own
breath.

Recently I've come across other artists that have
used the body in similarly shocking ways:

"Milk that may appear
by smell to be perfectly consumable (even organic), can contain contaminants
such as suspended particles, parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungi.Through
extensive recruitment within the upper echelons of society, we deliver the
finest milk purified in a way only we can. Our secret ingredient is in the
process through which rich, beautiful, white girls gargle your milk to absolute
perfection. It's her touch that sets us far above the rest. Each of the
carefully selected girls offer subtle differences of background, yet what
they share is most important. All are waiting to clean your milk with their
mouths. That is our promise to you!"

This is a real website where you
can buy 1/2 oz of milk gargled for 10 seconds by a white woman for $100.00 or 2
oz gargled for $200.00. You can choose between 6 different white women, each of
whom have a profile describing their background. You can also choose to buy the
video of them gargling your milk.

Any Google Image search
(with SafeSearch off) will reveal more images of this type than you could
imagine. The only difference between the images used in porn and “White Power
Milk” is the perspective and angle of the photos. Most pornographic shots of
women gargling cum are from above, mimicking the viewpoint of a man or men who
have just received a blowjob and discharged into her mouth. Hill has shifted
the perspective lower so that the women look less submissive but still on
display.

“Some people who feel they are at
a disadvantage in America because of their race (black people, for
example) can get a get a sense of power in the world from having a white
woman. They got a piece of the pie, so to speak. I named it “White Power
Milk” because I’m selling people that access to white girls from
powerful families. Those are the hardest white girls to get access to.
They are the powerful.

It’s about the power that white
women have over people’s minds. Some people think white girls are better
than other races. They think they’re better at sex, more loyal, more
polite, more compliant, bring less drama, or whatever. I put some examples
of this kind of thinking in these tweets I’ve posted on Young Manhattanite.

Nate Hill is good at pushing buttons and you can tell he likes it, maybe even gets off on it. All his projects poke holes into people’s ideas of comfort and force them to negotiate how far they are willing to go. Whether he is getting strangers to sit on his lap as part of “Free Bouncy Rides” (2009), inviting people to get out their physical frustration on a cute animal in “Punch Me Panda” (2010), posing in photos wearing white women as scarves ["for status and power"] in "Trophy Scarf" (2013), there was always an element in his performance that left many people — particularly non-art participants — puzzled but always amused.

"BitLabs grows meat from celebrity tissue samples and uses it to make artisanal salami. It all starts with your favorite celebrities, and a quick biopsy to obtain tissue samples. Isolating muscle stem cells, we grow celebrity meat in our proprietary bioreactors. In the tradition of Italian cured meats, we dry, age, and spice our product into fine charcuterie."

Martin, the CEO of bite labs said in an interview
with TIME that the company “want[s] to
prompt widespread discussion about bioethics, lab-grown meats, and celebrity
culture – this is very important to us.”

This level of celebrity worship is kind of scary to me but definitely absurd and possible in this age.

The website sells it as the Eco-friendly and healthy future of meat.

What do you think about it? What do you think about using the body itself as art material?